As a software developer, I love good tools. Also like a software developer, if a tool comes with too much overhead / baggage, I would prefer to use something I have more control over. There’s a lot of overhead in the time it takes to manage your own data and infrastructure, but there’s also a satisfaction in knowing that if it breaks you are capable and responsible to fix it. When you outsource part of your process, such as using Gmail or Protonmail to manage your email, you get a lot of benefit for free/cheap at the cost of limiting yourself to the walled garden you tool provider has made for you.
Recently, I’ve been reading more and more about Fair code. Open source has the problem that the developers who publish tools under the most open licenses often create very profitable industries that are well capitalized, but the maintainer sees very little of the benefit their labor has produced. It is quite common for developers to receive less than minimum wage, even as masses of eager users fill their Github issues queue to the brim.
Some projects are so fundamental that corporate sponsorship is easy; I’m thinking of standards bodies like ISO and W3C or Apache which comes to own a good number of key components that make the web work. A great many others are less fortunate and well liked projects are routinely abandoned as a result of not finding sponsorship.
This is turning into a ramble that I will likely rehome elsewhere. For now I’ll put a seedling out there to return to it later.
Characteristics I’m looking for:
- Open source: As in, I can read the source-code
- Self-hosting option: I can control the deployment pattern of the software if I want to (better if there is also a cloud hosting model)
- Data portability: Data should be easy to extract from the platform and it should be free/cheap to migrate away
- Profitable: I want to use tools that will exist years from now, so they must be profitable or have strong community maintenance to be worth the trouble of adopting.
- Secure/Private: I control what data is used by whom, no-one is reselling, or worse leaking through a hack, my data to 3rd parties.
I expect to expand this list over time. I also expect that every tool will be stronger in some respects and weaker in others, nothings perfect and $ has to come from somewhere.